


Entire of Itself

by pokey_jr



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alcohol Withdrawal, F/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-05 19:37:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13394805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pokey_jr/pseuds/pokey_jr
Summary: Broh, Rick takes you on a surprise adventure to an exotic island location.





	Entire of Itself

You are awoken by an incessant, high pitched beeping. Sad that your first thought isn't 'oh no, smoke alarm', but rather 'this fucking asshole _again'_. You throw on a hoodie over your faded graphic tee, slip on tennis shoes, and slam your front door closed. It's fourteen steps to his garage door if you cut through your yard. You're starting to wear a trail doing this little routine. As usual, the door is up, lights are on.

If you’re going to embroil yourself in a petty argument with a neighbor, there is no better time to do so than quarter past eleven at night. And there is no worse neighbor to confront than Mr. Rick Sanchez, the elderly curmudgeon who torments his family (and the rest of the block) with his big-S ‘Science’. Explosions in the dead of night, rampaging aliens, total disregard for safety. It’s a shame too, because some of the stuff he does seems really cool, but he’s so pretentious and elitist about it, you don’t want to get near him.

Unfortunately distance isn’t an option. As the resident of the house directly next to the Smiths, on the side with their garage, no less, you bear the brunt of Mr. Sanchez’s shenanigans.

He is so thoroughly obnoxious, you have to wonder if he might be hazing you. Aside from the science, he’s just a bad neighbor. Nightly disruptions make it impossible to sleep, he scowls when he sees you tending your garden, and at the block party barbecue six months ago to welcome you as the newest resident, he had usurped the festivities with a family-inappropriate dance party. More than once, he’s disposed of toxic waste in _your_ garbage bins. When you confronted him, he first denied it, then relented, but tried to buy your silence because he didn’t want to get in trouble with his family for refining plutonium in his garage workshop.

This night, when you think back on it, was much like many other nights: filled with similar annoyances, and confrontations, and petty grievances that boiled over. You'd called the cops on him a few times, but he always wormed his way out of it somehow. You can't be sure, but you suspect he has some sort of mind control device, from the way the cops have no recollection of previous, documented noise complaints (that, or he's paying them off). 

No one should have that kind of power over others, in your opinion. It's scary to consider, the idea that if he wanted, he could get rid of _you_. Have you whacked like in the Godfather. If he really is that powerful, why hasn't he done it? He'd made the threat once, obliquely, and you had asked him that very question. From his spittle-flecked ranting, you could only conclude that he preferred drama and conflict sometimes rather than actually getting what he wanted, and warring with you over parking spaces and garbage bins was a way to do so risk-free.

Tonight, it's neither of those. Tonight feels like being captured by pirates and being forced to walk the plank.

You notice as you get closer that the ground feels like it's rolling beneath your feet, as if you're aboard a ship in rough seas. You weave and stumble as the world tilts you, and manage to grab onto the door frame. It steadies you, but doesn't help the rapid onset of nausea.

Mr. Sanchez is hunched over a display panel, from which a proliferation of cables bursts like vines, all over the garage floor. They converge on a glowing orb, the only fixed point amidst the pitching and rolling.

He doesn't acknowledge you, so you make your way closer, snagging the edge of his workbench. "Mr. Sanchez!" You say loudly over the beeping. How is it not driving him crazy? Probably has old man hearing loss. "Mr. Sanchez!" You wave one arm.

He makes a groan of disgust and rolls his eyes when he sees you. " _Again?_ Isn't it past your bedtime?"

You let out a bark of incredulous laughter. "As a matter of fact, it is! Nice of you to notice!"

He ignores you, goes back to tinkering and you inch closer, trying to see what he’s doing so you might be able to file an accurate police report for once. There are tools arrayed in front of him, and other strange things. Many gizmos you don’t recognize, a few you do. 

The sounds continue, growing louder, and the undulation of the floor gets worse. How is his family still asleep with this racket? Not to mention the rest of the neighborhood. Over a glass of wine with Beth, his daughter, you had gained the impression that they’re all pretty much used to it by now, and there’s no point in trying to stop him. 

In the moment before the explosion, when the beeping goes silent and the power blinks out, you remember thinking, bizarrely, that he’s not bad looking. Rough around the edges, sure, and kooky, with a mean streak a mile wide. But he’s tall...well, that’s about it. The closer you look, the harder you think about it, he’s not attractive. Unruly blue grey hair, a bald spot. His eyebrow (a singular entity) has a few default shapes, mostly for variations on ‘displeased’. His nose is long and skinny, he is gaunt all over, his cheeks a bit hollow. He looks every bit his age save for the manic energy that possesses him. And yet you want to know him, intimately. Want to hear what his gruff voice sounds like when he moans, if his sallow complexion tinges pink when he masturbates, if he bites his lower lip and rolls his hips as he cums in his own hand. 

It is an improbable thought to have, as the initial shockwave blasts you off your feet, as the molecules of your body come apart. And he has no time to react. He swears at something on the display in front of him, reaches for a blocky grey gun that has a green dome on top. He doesn’t get it, and the world collapses around you. 

There’s no panic right away, and there’s no pain, though your nausea persists. The glowing orb is the locus of the explosion and subsequent implosion; you and Rick are knocked away from it, then sucked in. The rapid movement gives you whiplash, your shin bangs against the metal leg of the workbench and sparks of pain shoot up your leg. You and Rick slam into each other and everything goes bright white, even behind your eyelids. 

Your bodies twist together, in the careening chaos of whatever is happening, some abstract science you’ll have to ask him about, if you live-- you’re free spinning through a void that passes too quickly to see, and it’s _definitely_ not helping the nausea. Bile rises in your throat, you grab Rick’s bony arm out of some instinct that tells you he’s the only stable thing-- hope you don’t throw up on him--

And then the world is right again, except it’s _not_. You’re not even upright. There is sand under you, and Rick— no, Mr. Sanchez— on top and it’s sunny. How is it sunny? 

He is not on top of you in the typical romantic comedy meet-cute clumsy way. Oops I tripped and fell on you in a twee cupcakery and now we’re staring into each other’s eyes wondering, ‘could this really happen? How did I never _see_ you before?’ He is over you at an angle, your face is smushed into his armpit, which, somehow, is bony like the rest of him. And he smells… not great. Mostly it’s his lab coat, which is stained and smells more like stale beer than chemicals. 

He rolls off you, sits up. You blink, eyes still adjusting to the jarring change. You don’t want to sit up. If you sit up you’ll resign yourself to the fact that this is really happening. If you sit up you’ll vomit. You look to your other side, unobscured by long limbs, and see only a beach, stretching into a blur. Deep breaths. 

He groans, swearing a blue streak that gets your attention. He pats down his lab coat, then makes a swift and unsentimental assessment. “Uhhhhh… we’re fucked.”

_I don't wanna die here_ , you think. Is that declaration worth anything if you say it aloud? Even with your limited understanding, the sense of something very wrong steadies you, settles your stomach a bit. “What? Why? What just happened?”

He pats down his lab coat again. Comes up with nothing more than pocket detritus, but the kind of miscellany a mad scientist would have. Lengths of copper wire, diodes, a mini flathead screwdriver. And a flask. 

He uncaps it, takes a deep drink. Holds it up, shakes it a bit to hear the remaining liquid slosh. He grimaces, his shoulders slump. He drinks again.

“How much do you drink in a day?” You ask. It’s not one of the questions you _should_ be asking, but he replies anyway.

“The better question would be, how much do I restrain myself-- how much I _don't_ drink.” He heaves a sigh, which mutates to a lip-vibrating belch. “And the answer to all those questions is ‘I don’t know’. W-w-which isn’t something I say a lot, so don’t get used to hearing it.”

His blithe tone piques your anger. “You don’t _know?_ That-- whatever that thing was, your stupid doomsday machine, which nearly broke my leg, by the way--” you get up, brushing sand off your clothes. “I don’t have anything, my phone is on my nightstand, I’m in my pajamas, I’m not even wearing a--” you catch yourself. You were about to say ‘bra’. 

He _knows_ you were about to say it, somehow he knows, and he smirks up at you from his sprawl on the sand. He will never understand the discomfort of underboob sweat. And the audacity of that grin. Like he’s on a tropical vacation, all he needs is pina colada with a little umbrella in it, and you, as the scantily-clad waitress serving it to him. You make the mistake of imagining him in swim trunks, and are, again, confronted with conflicting emotions-- the warm arousal that suffuses you, and the disgust with yourself for being attracted to _him._

You don’t know him. That needs to be your mantra, because apparently everything else about him-- the rudeness, alcoholism, _oldness_ \-- isn’t enough to put you off. Not to mention his bald spot and general disorganization. He gets up, fully up, and towers over you. You look to the side, first the ocean, then the tree line. 

“Can you at least tell me where we are?”

His mouth presses to a thin line, he looks where you’re looking. “...nooooope.”

“Eh?”

“No fucking idea.”

“Really, I thought you knew almost everything. But you can’t answer what just happened, where we are, _and_ you don’t know how much you drink in a day.”

He glares at you. “L-look, I don’t need you having a class-5 freakout just because we’re stuck on an alien planet or something. And besides--”

“We’re stuck?! How long? I have work tomorrow.”

“-- BESIDES, there might be, y-y-you know, aliens around. Who can help us. Some friendly aliens who’ll give us a ship. We’ll be fine. Wait… No. I was right the first time. We’re screwed.”

“Wha-- how do you know that?” You’ve surrendered any attempt to keep the panicked anger out of your voice.  
Rick taps his left eye, right on the cornea. Doesn’t even blink. It’s unsettling. “Cybernetic. Just upgraded it too, got some-- some pretty sweet bio-sensors on this baby. Yep, nothing here except some wild… well, actually, I don’t know what they’re called..”

“Well can your fancy robot eye detect a way to get us out of here? Get us back home?”

“If I can— if it could I’d already be back home with my pants around my ankles, a-and sipping whiskey. And maybe or maybe not having abaaa—eeugh—andoned _annoying neighbors._ ”

_“What?” Did he really—?_

Before you can process his bare threat to leave you behind on an alien world, he is striding off towards the tree line— although, it doesn’t look particularly alien. These are palm trees, the sand is white, the sky and ocean complimentary blues. Paradise, if only there were a resort nearby. You stalk after him, incensed. “What are you doing?”

“Always with the questions, Nancy Drew. Give it a break… I’m gonna-- need to make a distress beacon. MacGyver this shit. So you can get home to your shitty life of being a corporate drone and I can go back to jerkin off and drinking myself to sleep.”

“Oh, so _I’m_ the one with the shitty life?” 

He shrugs before sitting down and clearing a flat space on the ground by the base of a tree. “I do what makes me happy. You— you work in customer service and have to wear a shit eating grin and pretend you care. Doesn’t that wear you down? Just give it up, stop pretending you’re happy and indulge your every whim like the rest of us. Nice, though, your first thought— first thing you’re worried about, be—eeugh—ing stuck here is that you can’t get to work the next day.” He scoffs, as if he knows some grand truth that no one else can comprehend.

_Bullshit_ , you want to say. He’s not happy, not really. There’s just no way. Also, you don’t work in customer service, and you launch into a long winded ‘well, _actually_ …’ on that point, because as you are swiftly coming to realize, Rick Sanchez hates being wrong, which makes it all the more gratifying to correct him. 

“H-hey.” He snaps your name, interrupting you. “Ti--eeugh--ime is the enemy, here. Y-you— if you keep yapping in my face, you know, distracting me, I might not get this thing finished before—“ he breaks off, shakes his head. Hunches over further to peer at the tiny circuit board.

“Before what?”

He ignores that question, fiddling with a minuscule screw. Uses a lighter to do makeshift soldering. You sit down and watch, and, against every instinct to pepper him with accusatory questions, listen. He has no answers about where, or how, or why, but he explains other things: a portal gun— that grey boxy device he tried to grab before the incident. Would have saved a whole lot of trouble. His flask, the contents of which keep him functioning. What’s in it? You expect some strange chemical with all the properties of alcohol but none of the side effects. No, he says, sounding happy to get the chance to clarify. Straight whiskey, from a distillery in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He emphasizes that, out of all the places he’s visited, there is no better liquor than is produced in certain regions of Earth. 

This offhand remark— multiverses? Really?— opens up many more avenues for questioning, but you restrain yourself. The trauma of the day is still settling, the reality that you will be here, with him, indefinitely, will require more introspection and you don’t think you’re quite up for it, especially since he won’t share that flask. 

Plus, his hands. Watching them work is a joy in itself, one which you acknowledge with equal parts guilt and puerile fascination. They are large and elegant, no surprise given the rest of him. His fingers are dexterous, knuckles protrude under thin skin, veins pop on the backs of his hands. What fantastical things have they touched, in his lifetime? 

His explanation of multiverses is patronizing and mostly goes over your head, but leaves you intensely curious. You exist here, and now, but also, everywhere else, at the same time, and should you do perhaps one tiny routine action a little differently, well, then, everything changes. It’s too much to contemplate, and, you quickly conclude, pointless, because you’re stuck, with him. Stuck with the only man who could have any chance of engineering a rescue, and even he’s a bit lost. 

He rambles as he works, his rough voice an anchor amidst the sounds of the waves on the beach, the wind in the trees, and your own creeping dread. That, you hold at bay, trusting in his expertise. He must have something to help you survive, but he reveals, casually, that other than a snack compartment in his cybernetic arm, he has no rations, and nothing in the way of camping gear. He adds the assessment that while it’s temperate now, around midday, it’ll get cold at night, and probably windier. 

He holds up the device when he’s finished. It’s no larger than a USB stick, though not quite as sleek. Loops of wire protrude at odd angles, and when he sees your expression he gets defensive. “...best I could do with… seven screws, limited wire, and a transistor I mistook for a dessert fork. Th-this here is what we call ‘low speed, high drag’.” He seems genuinely enthused as he activates it and sees that it works, adding a caveat that it could be years before anyone even detects the signal it’s broadcasting. 

This reminder brings reality crashing down again— you had, while he was working, been caught up listening to him and his wacky stories. “Years…” you echo hollowly.

“Mhmmm.” He tucks the beacon into a pocket of his lab coat, then leans back against the tree with his long legs kicked out. “We could be here awhile. A-and I’m-- this won’t be pretty.”

“What won’t?” You ask stupidly before processing his implication. No alcohol means he’ll go into withdrawal.

He holds up his flask, as if to say, ‘yes, you _are_ stupid.’ Shakes it and you hear what’s left of the liquor slosh inside.

“If no one answers that beacon within, uh, 12 to 24 hours, I—eeeurgh— I’m gonna…” He brings it to his lips, sucking the last of it down. “You might have to wait for rescue alone. So, y-you know, get comfortable.” 

Get comfortable. Right. You’re already chilly, and your shin hurts. You’d lifted your pant leg earlier and noted a bruise forming. It’s hard not to feel angry with him. Resentful for his shortcomings, though you barely know him, have no right to judge him, but he got you both into this mess, and he doesn’t even care enough about himself to be freaking out. 

“W-what’s wrong? Thinking about how long it might be before you get laid again?” He pats his thigh, leering at you. “You could always hop on some old man dick. Make it quick, though, I’m not gonna be in great shape preeeetty soon here.”

_You fucking miserable asshole._ You refrain from saying it aloud. The invitation is tempting, and once you acknowledge your traitorous libido, you tamp it down. The only thing you can do is walk away, so you stalk down the beach, trying to get out of your own head.

It’s impossible. The same few thoughts turn and twist and harry you: how did this disaster happen? Your fault? His? But mostly, why is Rick such an asshole. Not Rick— Mr. Sanchez, you remind yourself. Need that distance. His suggestive expressions are no help on that account, though your inexplicable attraction to him is all on you.

Blaming him would be easiest, but space and solitude begin to smooth the irrational edges of your anger. It’s still frustrating not to know— to not be able to attach some kind of purpose or meaning. It was an accident. He has just as much to lose as you do, being here, and he’s going to suffer. An hour ago (you check your watch, and it works, though is still set to local time back home) the thought would have cheered you, or at least filled you with grim satisfaction. 

He’s the epitome of a bad neighbor, and all those nights he carelessly woke you up made you loathe him enough to fantasize about escalating the feud and sabotaging some of his science equipment. If only. Then you wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be thinking about any of this, wouldn’t be doing the mental equivalent of a dog chasing its own tail.

You make your way down the beach, and find that it’s not as extensive as you first thought. Sand gives way to rockier terrain, and soon you’re clambering higher and higher above the water. And you’re aware, the whole time, that one false step would be the end. There’s no one around who could help you. That’s enough of a risk to make you stop climbing, so you sit and stare across the water. Being alone with your thoughts is not doing you any favors, but it’s not like there’s an alternative.

For a while, you dwell what could have prompted your newfound interest in someone you so heartily dislike-- and there are plenty of reasons to despise him. Had he hit on you before and you just never noticed? And now that he has, what could you possibly say to him? There’s no way that conversation could go well.

_“The fact that I am attracted to you disgusts me.”_

_He would give you a lopsided grin, as if that’s exactly what he wants you to say. He’d look at you like you’re another one of his science projects, a puzzle to be solved, a fact to be catalogued. He will observe your reactions and test you, and, oh yes, he would enjoy the fact that you find him revolting. Enjoy holding your head down, laugh as you moan in spite of yourself, ask you how good his cock feels, fucking open that sweet young pussy—_

You shake yourself out of the pointless daydream, embarrassed at the arousal it stirs in you. The exertion of exploring has made you hungry, combined with the fact that your internal clock is telling you to go back to sleep. And it’s starting to get dark as you walk back. How will you get food? Water? —those are tomorrow problems. Perhaps Mr. Sanchez will share those peanuts from his snack compartment. No such luck. By the time you return, he’s eaten them, and vomited them back up in the sand next to him. 

He is propped up against the tree, in a restless stupor. He’s snoring open-mouthed, with drool on his lower lip, and he’s loud enough to be heard over the night sounds of the forest and the waves. You consider trying to move him, worried that the tide might come up this high, but he won’t wake up, and he’s too heavy for you to even drag.  
From all the anger and disbelief, one emotion is distilled as you look down at him. Concern. He’s shivering and shaking, his angular body much too thin to be healthy. You sit on the non-vomit side and resist huddling too close. Don’t want him to throw up on you, plus he doesn’t seem like much of a cuddler. 

At some point during the night he shifts and pulls you in, needing warmth probably. It is cold, and he gloms onto you like he’s siphoning your body heat, which makes it even more difficult to sleep. He smells more unpleasant than he did earlier, sweat and vomit and alcohol. 

Eventually you drift back to sleep, and to fitful dreams of him, some bizarre and scary, some vaguely erotic. But the only one you remember in the morning is one where he’s falling, and it’s still a long way down.


End file.
